Apocalypse Not

As everyone knows, climate orthodoxy holds that climate change from carbon emissions is going to make extreme weather more extreme. So I won’t hold my breath waiting to hear the climatistas commenting on this story from the Bezos BulletinWashington Post today:

In the whirlwind that is 2018, there has been a notable lack of high-end twisters.

We’re now days away from this becoming the first year in the modern record with no violent tornadoes touching down in the United States. . . It was a quiet year for tornadoes overall, with below normal numbers most months. Unless you’re a storm chaser, this is not bad news. The low tornado count is undoubtedly a big part of the reason the 10 tornado deaths in 2018 are also vying to be a record low.

The story also offers this chart of tornado trends over the last several decades:

As the Post reports:

In simple terms, there have been downtrends in violent tornado numbers both across the entire modern period, and when looking at just the period since Doppler radar was fully implemented across the country in the mid-1990s. A 15-year average as high as 13.7 in the mid-1970s will drop to 5.9 next year. Expanding to include all “intense” tornadoes, or those F/EF3+, this year’s 12 is also poised to set a record for the fewest.

I think this is what you’d call an inconvenient truth for the climate fearmongers.

Meanwhile, Roger Pielke Jr has updated his calculation of “normalized damages” from tornados (meaning adjusted for inflation and population growth & density, etc), and finds this trend to be the opposite of the fearmongering story line: